Current emergency services provide emergency response from standard emergency personnel, such as policemen, firemen, EMTs, etc. An individual in distress traditionally requests assistance from one or more of these emergency personnel by dialing 911 on a standard telephone and reporting the emergency to an emergency operator. The emergency operator then dispatches the appropriate emergency personnel to the distressed individual's location.
The increased popularity of wireless technology prompted emergency services personnel to work with wireless technology providers to develop a 911 system compatible with the landline 911 system. The resulting E911 service essentially provides the same emergency services as the landline equivalent. As with landline emergency services, E911 enables a user to notify emergency officials of an emergency.
In some instances, it is critical that specific individuals be aware of an emergency. For example, a person may want to be notified when a spouse or child has called 911. These individuals may provide critical information, such as consent to medical treatment, allergy information, and medication history to health care officials.
One simple solution to the above problem is for an individual in distress to notify emergency contacts by placing separate calls to each emergency contact. This solution is highly undesirable for many reasons. First, a user may be unconscious or otherwise unavailable to place multiple calls to individual or personal emergency contacts. Even if a user is available to make emergency calls, a user may simply forget to notify individual or personal emergency contacts due to the stress and shock associated with the emergency. Further, a user may have to use multiple avenues of communication, such as telephone, email, pager, etc., to contact one or more emergency contacts, which further compounds the stress and anxiety of the user.
Various technologies currently exist that enable a user to automatically notify particular individuals of an emergency. U.S. Pat. No. 5,742,666 to Alpert discloses a system wherein a cellular telephone automatically dials the phone number of one or more predefined emergency contacts in the event of an emergency. A pre-recorded message is played to each emergency contact. Alternatively, the user may participate in the emergency communication with an emergency contact upon receiving notification that the cellular telephone has successfully made a connection with the emergency contact. This invention is limited to sequentially sending a single pre-recorded audio message to multiple emergency contacts.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,805,670 to Pons et al. discloses a private notification system that communicates 911 information to pre-selected recipients identified by the user. This information may include location, telephone number, and any other information provided to the emergency systems operator. The system may use wireless, facsimile, and public data networks to transmit emergency information, such as location of emergency, destination hospital, etc., to emergency contacts. In response to a 911 signal, a command control center notifies predetermined emergency contacts and sends information generated by the 911 communication to the emergency contacts. This invention is limited to sending a single message to multiple emergency contacts. Further, implementation of this notification system requires modifications to the network.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2002/0042846 A1 to Bottan et al. discloses a system that notifies multiple contacts of an emergency according to predefined instructions. Upon receiving a predetermined input, a cellular telephone sends an event signal to the wireless network to activate an automatic notification system. This system is applicable to predefined communications as well as emergency communications. The network may send a pre-stored message to various contacts through email, facsimile, telephone, etc. However, implementation of this notification system requires modifications to the wireless network.
The above patents and published application disclose various methods for automatically notifying emergency contacts. However, they do not enable delivery of multiple user-defined messages via multiple delivery methods to multiple emergency contacts without modification of the wireless network.